THE DORK MANUAL

Your hosted Lab

A hosted Lab runs research on a separate machine, so eligible work can continue when the desktop app is closed. The app is your workspace for directing that work and reading its returns. Closing the window does not stop the hosted machine.

Before you leave work running

Confirm that your Lab is connected, your model account is authorized, and the assignment has actually started. Set a bounded task with a clear stopping point. Read any allowance, permission, or setup warnings before leaving.

A disconnected app cannot show current progress until it reconnects. On return, let Dork catch up before judging whether work has finished. A frozen connection indicator is not evidence that the researcher stopped or that an assignment succeeded.

What can pause research

Work depends on available capacity, a healthy Lab, a valid model account, and the assignment’s permissions and allowance. Unknown authorization or capacity must hold work. If a ChatGPT plan limit is reached, research pauses until the limit resets and authorization is checked again. Disconnecting the plan also pauses model use.

The hosted subscription design does not silently substitute a model paid for by Dork when your plan is unavailable. A failed or held run should remain visible as such; it is not a completed research result.

Hosting and costs

The hosted architecture uses Google Cloud. Subscription model access and cloud compute are different costs. Do not infer that a zero API-token price means the machine, storage, or entire Lab is free.

Invited access, pricing, available regions, and compute allowances depend on your arrangement with Dork. No universal price, uptime commitment, or unlimited-compute entitlement is established here. Billing data can be delayed; unavailable billing is not zero spending.

Local and hosted are different

Local work depends on the computer running the Lab remaining available. Hosted work depends on the remote Lab. In either case, permitted research context can leave that machine for a model provider. Read privacy and data before uploading confidential material.

A configured hosted architecture does not establish that every invitation has a provisioned, healthy Lab. Follow the status shown for your own Lab.